Associate Professor Cassandra Atherton

Photo credit: Fukahori Mizuho

Associate Professor Cassandra Atherton is an award-winning Australian prose-poet, critic and scholar. She is an expert on prose poetry, contemporary public intellectuals in academe and poets as public intellectuals, especially hibakusha poets. Most recently, Cassandra was a Visiting Scholar in English at Harvard University sponsored by Professor Stephen Greenblatt and she was a Visiting Fellow in the Institute of Comparative Culture at Sophia University, Tokyo in 2014. She has published nineteen critical and creative books (with six more in progress) and has been invited to edit ten special editions of leading refereed journals. She is currently writing Prose Poetry: An Introduction with Professor Paul Hetherington for Princeton University Press.

Cassandra is the current poetry editor of Westerly Magazine. Her prose poetry has been widely anthologized both nationally and internationally in publications such as Best Australian Poems (Black Inc.) and Strange Cargo: Five Australian Poets (Smith|Doorstop, UK). She has been awarded the Sanlane prize, a Blanc literary award, a Melbourne University award, the University of California Mary Schroeder award for best interview and has been a successful recipient of more than fifteen national and international research grants and teaching awards including, most recently a VicArts grant (2016) and an Australian Council Grant (2017) for her work on atomic bomb poetry.

Cassandra has judged the prestigious Australian Book Review Elizabeth Jolley Award in 2014, The Lord Mayor’s Poetry Prize in 2016 and 2017 and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, Prize for Poetry in 2015, convening the award in 2016. She judged the Spineless Wonders joanne burns microlit award in 2016 and 2017, and is now the series editor of Spineless Wonders microlit anthologies.

Other recent events include:

Word for Word Literary Festival 2014:

The Fictional Woman: Tara Moss in Conversation with Cassandra Atherton